I’ve been messing around with searching using Quicksilver, and man am I amazed. Any site you can search (google, yahoo, newzbin, etc…) you can setup a quick search using Quicksilver and your default browser. My default browser is Firefox and the search I’ll show you is for my site since google is already searchable by default with Quicksilver.
First off, make sure you have the Web Search Module plugin installed. This is what allows you to do these quick easy searches.
Next, go to your browser and navigate to a search engine or the site you would like to search. I’m going to PHATO Productions Blog (hey, thats mine).
Now do a search in the search field and submit that search.
Notice the url after you submit the search. Your gonna want to copy that url.
Now create a bookmark. In my case the bookmark url is going to be http://www.phatoproductions.com/blog/index.php?s=mac&sbutt=Go. I’m not going to keep the whole url though, I’m going to replace the search query (mac) with three stars (***). When we use Quicksilver the 3 stars will allow us to put our search query in there.
After you have created your bookmark, goto Quicksilver preferences and refresh your bookmarks for your default browser, just in case Quicksilver hasn’t done that yet.
Now invoke Quicksilver and type in the name of your bookmark.
Tab over twice and type in a search and then hit enter.
The search should open up your browser with the site you are searching with the search query, notice the url.
Thats it. Quick, easy, simple… And now your searches will be the same way once you have them all setup. I hope this helps you out, and if it is redundant, I’m sorry, but this tip would have helped me yesterday, hehe.
Technorati Tags: applications, mac, Quicksilver, tips, tutorials
So I had about 20 GBs in a folder on one server and I wanted to move that folder to another server. So I decided the best way to do this (and maybe the only way) would be to do it through the shell. Both of my servers are linux, and both allow login via ssh. I logged in to the server that I’m going to copy the files to and then I used rsync and here is the command I used:
rsync -av -e ssh username@oldserverhost:/home/old_folder/ /home/new_folder/
This was done on Dreamhost servers so the folders might be different on other servers. This was very helpful for me and I hope it will be for you too. One last thing. the v in the command stands for verbose. If you don’t want to view what is taking place in the transfer, leave the v out.
Technorati Tags: coding, help, tutorials
I’m not sure if anyone else knew this, but I couldn’t find anywhere on how to do this. I use xampp as my local web server and to start apache and mysql you have to go into terminal, login as the super user an then type the command to start it. Well this started to get tedious and I wanted to run 1 command to start xampp. This is how I did it.
I used automator to accomplish my task. Open automator, on the left click automator under applications an then in the list that shows up to the right, drag Run Applescript in the pane to the right. Once you have your applescript box up, type this in there:
do shell script “/Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/mampp start” password “password” with administrator privileges
Make sure you tupe it all on one line, if it word wraps for you, that is ok, just don’t manually hit return. Once you have this in the input box, change “password” to whatever your super user password is. After you do this click compile. Now you can click the run button above and this should start up apache and mysql. I then went ahead and saved this as an application in my Applications folder and whenever I need to start it up, I just do it using Quicksilver.
This is a simple process but now I just have to do 1 step instead of 3 or 4. A simple time saver. You could also have this application run at boot so you don’t even have to do anything.
Technorati Tags: applications, coding, mac, tips, tutorials
Todays tutorial covers how to move a selection you have in the finder to any folder of your choosing with a simple hotkey. I show you how to do this by setting up a trigger and using the proxy object “Current Selection.” I ramble on, but you get the idea of what I was going for.
Click Here to view the tutorial - 2 min. 15 sec.
Technorati Tags: applications, mac, Quicksilver, tutorials
Many people just go out and buy a computer, hook it up and get to working or playing on it. I’m sure the average Joe never really understands what goes into getting this computer to function correctly. Is this important, certainly not if you have money to have the geek squad drive their little bug down to your place to get you back up and running. But what about those that don’t have money and they need to troubleshoot what is wrong with their computer. Well, this, believe it or not, is actually not that difficult. You just need to know a few things and you could be on your way to actually knowing a little bit about the machine you trust with your life’s work.
There are just a few components that I’m going to cover, and I’m gonna try not to drag on about things, just tell you enough to understand why your computer needs these components. Lets start with the obvious shall we.
The monitor (or the screen you look at with those eye balls of yours)
This component is amongst the three you use the most. All the visuals of the computer are viewed on the monitor. This is an LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) if you have a newer computer, or a CRT (don’t know what that stands for) if you have an older computer. The CRT is a big clunky thing, where the LCD is a thin, sleek piece of hardware. The computer supplies the monitor with images that are transmitted from the video card (we’ll cover this in a second). If your computer is on and you aren’t getting a picture to your monitor than it is either not plugged in, there is a problem with the monitor, or a problem with the video card.
The Mouse and Keyboard
These two components are the tools you use to navigate around on your computer. The keyboard is obviously for typing, hotkeys, or other types of simple or complex input. The mouse is a simple tool used to drag, drop, click, double-click, and just navigate your computer in a simple manner. if your mouse cursor is not moving when you move your mouse, it may not be plugged in or if you have a wireless one the batteries may be dead, or not exist. Same goes for the keyboard. Now onto the more interesting stuff.
I had a buddy of mine call me up today and his question was, “Why, when I click on my Firefox icon in the dock, does it ask me if I want to mount the image?” Well my first though was, he didn’t know how to install applications on a mac. I had this problem when I first got my mac as well, and since he is a new Mac user who came from Windows, it is an honest mistake and I was happy to help him out.
When installing applications on a Mac, most of the time there is no installer. Usually you get a .dmg file which is an image file. If you double click the .dmg file it will be mounted and usually open the mounted disk for you. Now you should see a file that has a .app extension. For Firefox I’m assuming it is Firefox.app. What you do with this file is not double click it as if it were an installer, but you want to drag this file into your Applications directory. This will install Firefox for you or whatever application you are trying to install. Simple enough for the experienced, but confusing for the Windows user just switching over.
What my friend did was dragged the icon from the .dmg file into his dock and then unmounted the image. Every time he clicked the icon in the dock, sure enough, the .dmg file was mounted.
So, there you have it, my quick run down of how to install applications on a Mac.
So I got a call today. My friend was asking how I went about getting rid of something and replacing it with something else. For example, remove the sky from a photograph and replace it with a different, better, sky. Well, I walked him through it, he thanked me, and then I thought… Many people may not know how easy this actually is (but it can be complicated depending on how well you want to do it). So, I decided I would do a screencast to show you all how to go about accomplishing this feat with masks. A link to the video is below.
I apologize for the the audio is not being so great, I was using Parallels with Windows installed on my mac, so I don’t think it really works that great for recording audio with the Internal Mic on my Macbook. Anyhow, Enjoy!
Check this out, you can create files, folders, etc… with this quick tip. Here is where I got this info from.
The article above shows you how to make a new file using quicksilver, but I wanted to create new folders as well. Here is a quote from the article:
“Basically Alcor (the Quicksilver developer) has included a default action “Make New” which is not usable without a little setup. What you need to do is create a folder called “Templates” in ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver. In that folder you just add files of the sort you create on a regular basis, e.g. Word Documents, text documents, spreadsheets, whatever.”
Well, to create a new folder using quicksilver, just add a new folder and name it whatever you like, I called my “new folder” (creative, aren’t I?). Put this folder in the ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver folder. Now when you activate quicksilver, navigate to the folder you would like to create your new folder in, then tab over and type “Make New”, then tab over and select the name of the folder you put in there, in my case “new folder”. Quicksilver has created the new folder and brings that folder up in Quicksilver. Now if you want to rename the folder (I believe it defaults to .untitled) just tab over and type “rename” then tab over again and type in the new name. If you get good at this you can create folders and move files into that folder very quickly.
Just thought that point needed to be covered since it wasn’t cover in the article.
Technorati Tags: applications, mac, Quicksilver, tips, tutorials
